So I Got Some Friends Together and Put In a Kitchen Garden

I'm a garden voyeur. In the summer you can catch me walking through alleys, peeping over fences at any little garden in the neighborhood. I want to see what people prioritize in their gardens, what kind of veggies they eat, how they structure their growing space. I look for answers to questions I didn't know I had, for great new ideas, and for really, really bad ideas. I am learning how many decisions go into the making of a garden, and how every decision is a reflection of the gardener and the gardener's community; peeking into a stranger's garden is a little bit of peeking into their life. It's an intimate glance at best, invasive in the worst case.
We put our garden in the front yard so that nobody would have to feel like a voyeur if they wanted to look.  And the day we put it in, it felt like the whole neighborhood was looking. They asked us where we bought our beds (we built them from lumber at Siwek's in NE), why we were arranging our beds the way we did, what we were going to plant in our beds. "VEGGIES" I said. Kayla and Micah came over that Sunday morning. The men built beds and played Kubb, the women dug sod and forked dirt. I was foreman, telling everyone what to do and where to put things, and cook, making sure the kids had snacks and the volunteers had beer and spaghetti. We worked all day, drew lots of attention, got four raised beds built, sited, and forked, then we showered and drove to brats at John L's. My muscles quivered from it all.

Some early days in the vegetable patch:

so enthusiastic